A PERFECTLY CLEAN spectrum of a newly
synthesized compound is a work of art to a
synthetic chemist—it can require painstaking lab work to get rid of any signs of solvent
and impurities. But sometimes a pristine
spectrum isn’t possible, either for lack of lab
equipment, researcher skill, money, or time.

In such cases, a researcher might touch
up the data by removing the offending peaks
in a spectrum. Although massaging data in
this manner is rare and not as egregious as
outright falsifying of data, it violates ethical
standards of scientific research.

One journal editor has decided it’s time
to pipe up about it. Amos B. Smith III, a
chemistry professor at the University of
Pennsylvania and editor of the American
Chemical Society journal Organic Letters,
has written an editorial—published online
on June 5—to alert the
chemistry community to “a
serious problem related to
the integrity of data being
submitted” (DOI: 10.1021/
ol401445g).

ORG. LETT.

To help quash the problem, Smith has added a
dedicated data analyst to
the Organic Letters editorial
staff to help check spectral
and other characterization data. The move to
add a data analyst follows
the lead of ACS’s Journal
of Organic Chemistry. The
publications appear to be
the only two chemistry
journals to use data analysts to support editorial staff and external
manuscript reviewers.

The editorial is a “warning shot” forchemists that they will be held accountablefor data manipulation, comments John A.Gladysz, a chemistry professor at TexasA&M University and editor-in-chief ofACS’s journal Organometallics. Gladysz saysthe eventual fallout from the increased scru-tiny could make it more acceptable for datapresented in a paper to not look perfect.

“EVERYTHING THAT improves the quality
of the data published in the scientific literature is to be applauded,” says Peter Gölitz,
editor-in-chief of Ange wandte Chemie, which
is published by Wiley-VCH on behalf of the
German Chemical Society. Although he
doesn’t use dedicated data analysts, Gölitz
notes that, like other chemistry journals,
Wiley-VCH publications have trained
chemists as full-time editors who are scrutinizing manuscripts and supporting information along with the reviewers. “Given
the total number of manuscripts and the
diversity of topics, there are of course limits
to what one editor, or what a data analyst
for that matter, can do,” he says.

At Nature Chemistry, the editorial staff
doesn’t include a data analyst, but spot
checks are made on figures in papers to
monitor for manipulated images, says Chief
Editor Stuart Cantrill, who formerly served
on the editorial staff of Organic Letters.

“We’re starting to look at ways of engag-ing with the community on the issue ofmaking raw data available alongside spectraand other figures,” Cantrill says. There cur-rently isn’t a widespread culture of sharingsuch data in the chemistry community, withthe exception of files associated with X-raycrystallography, he notes. “We hope that do-ing so will reduce the likelihood of research-ers reporting fraudulent data and increasethe chances of detecting it if they do.”“We are not out to catch people andsanction them, but to make sure papers areaccurate,” Poulter says. “Our efforts arepart of what I think of as a remarkable ser-vice for authors to help improve the qualityof the data they publish.” ◾